Ah, It's An Ancient Greek Style "Death Ray"

[Tuckerfan]

Sadly, the range is rather limited.

The Solar Death Ray is made of 112 mirrors mounted on a platform 4 feet wide and 6 feet tall. Each mirror is a square roughly 3.5 inches on edge. All these mirrors focus the sun to a single spot 5 feet, 6 inches from the mirror platform. A wooden fork extends from the mirror base to the area near the focus and serves as a mounting point for Solar Death Ray targets. The mirror platform is mounted to the support frame on a pivot that allows the platform to be angled. The whole system is mounted on a set of wheels.

Still, it looks like it’d be a lot of fun to play with.

[Sunspace]

I was thinking about this yesterday… if we add another set of angled mirrors at the focal point to ‘re-parallelise’ the concentrated rays into an intense output beam, then add a third pivoted simple flat mirror, we can direct the beam wherever we want. (I suspect the second and third mirrors would have to be metal-backed to stand the heat, and I’m not sure that a diverging lens in place of the second mirror would survive.)

Definitely would be fun. For sufficiently chaotic values of ‘fun’…